Problem with all songs in playlists that have accented characters in the artist or song name

I have two tracks synced from my iTunes library which appear in two separate playlists in iTunes but do not appear on my fenix 6X.

The tracks are there on the device and appear in the Songs set but do not appear in the playlists that they are supposed to be in.

Both of these tracks and only those two tracks as far as I can tell have codepoints higher than 128 that are not ASCII characters:

- "Yoü And I" by Lady Gaga
- "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)" by Rupert Holmes

The characters are 'ü' (U+00FC) latin small u with diaeresis and with and 'ñ' (U+00F1) latin small n with tilde.

My hypothesis is that Playlists can't parse track names that are not ASCII.

No, I don't think this is a bug. I had the same as you, and I had to rename my song list. It also happens the same with the songs on my car via USB songs list

Polaris no it’s definitely a bug and an embarrassing one. It appears to be a failure to handle basic Unicode encoding correctly in playlists. The watch is supposed to support Unicode — you may have noticed Garmin calling out new Emoji glyphs supported in the 4.62 beta firmware. That is Unicode. Also, the music app does handle higher than ASCII codepoints correctly in the Music player outside of the context of playlists. 

It used to be back in the 70s and 80s that text characters each fit into 7 bits. When Unicode was designed they decided to encode the first byte in all encodings the same as ASCII. As a result in UTF-8 if you are using only Roman characters (like in English) the encoding looks the same as ASCII. Naive, bad code (and old code) even today will just use 8 bits (1 byte) per character in C strings. That code is broken, but will work just fine if all you feed it is English. 

I think something along these lines is the problem and when Garmin updates their test case, the developers will see and correct the issue pretty easily. 

I would also be happy if could recognize my songs with Japanese characters. They can be played, but there are only question marks instead of characters.

The ? indicates there is no glyph in the available font to represent the codepoint. These are two separate problems:

- the music app can’t “see” any track with name or artist that contains a character that can’t be represented in ASCII and any such track is dropped from the playlist

- the music app doesn’t have a font to represent codepoints for Japanese Kanji (and I would bet other Asian character sets)

I don't ever see them fixing this.  I have mixed tracks and they have to play in order because they are beat-mixed.   I maybe had 2 dozen songs that didn't transfer (windows 10).  So, I had to do the following to fix it.  Not for the faint of heart.  I have an open ticket to support, and this is so low on their totem pole of problems, it'll never, ever get addressed. 

• Connect the watch to the PC.
• Open file explorer and browse to the watch then MUSIC folder.
• in the root you will see the playlists, not the songs.   Open a playlist file to see what is TRULY transferred over.  Find the missing tracks and then go rename those tracks without the special characters.
• This will break your iTunes playlist because the old file doesn't exist anymore, so you will need to delete the old, add the new.  Then try doing the playlist transfer again.
• You will have to do this for each missing track.

It's a ROYAL pain in the ass.

Thanks for letting me know. I thought it supposed to be like this because, as I said, it happens to my car by connected via the USB thumb drive. But as DCeremuga said, I don't think Garmin will be going to fix the issue. I don't have more song, but it annoying for people has a thousand songs.

Your car is also broken.

The playlist thing is just a straight-up bug and should be straightforward to fix once identified as an issue.

The font glyph thing for Asian codepoints may be a legitimate memory constraint. It may be the reason they produce APAC editions. 

Really. My car is the year 2014 that not too old car. If yes, as you said then, this is embarrassing for Nissan. Every time I want to update the song list for my car or either Garmin, I have to rename the songs. Feel bad

I agree it’s embarrassing. 

A lot of in-car entertainment systems are outsourced to 3rd party vendors. I don’t know how Nissan did it.